A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: seeing the Perseids in the armpit of a lover, lingering at the doors to the spirit world, taking a sledgehammer to the walls of a childhood home, and much more. Enjoy!
I love weddings, particularly the speeches and the way the words people choose make me tingle at the very humanness of being. My brother, Mark, gave a wonderful address at the end of the ceremony and my sister and I marvelled at his capable public speaking and the way he made us laugh as well as think and celebrate the couple.
When talking about their honeymoon, the bride and groom mentioned that the place they were travelling to had a hot tub and they were planning to relax there while watching the perseid meteor shower. This struck me as a wonderful way to watch the spectacle. It also reminded me how different things are this year compared to 2020 when I wrote my perseid poem ‘Invitation’. We were in lockdown then and being sociable was very limited indeed. One night back then I dreamt that I was invited to see the perseids in the armpit of a lover, and there they were in great detail and great number. It was a superb dream for the content and for my wondering about how the world had changed.
Sue Finch, BEING SOCIABLE AGAIN
I’ve been in a bubble of creativity and joy, peace and love at Green Gathering. I’ve been off-grid in a happy place of sharing hope and listening, talking and learning, a celebration of music and poetry, laughter and humanity.
Then when I charge my phone back up, I see a message from my mother ‘they are coming’ … my heart races to ring her and hear her voice and check she is ok. I know who she means, I know who they are, deep down I know it, as children of immigrants we know this. We gather. We ring around to each other. We check in. We protect. Intrinsically. Instinctively.
Salena Godden, Our Anarchy
Each family harks back to someone
Ama Bolton, Most of us are immigrants …
living or long gone into legend
who fled from inquisitor or ayatollah
from sniper, bailiff, blackmailer
lynch-mob or jobsworth
from earthquake or failed harvest
broken promise or hasty fist
from water rising or water in retreat
a lost fortune, a good name gone bad
a hut in ashes or a tower in flames
In Malika [Booker]’s interview, included in the same issue, she talks about the poem being inspired by, and in response to, two poems – “de Carribbean Woman” by Jean Binta Breeze and “Epitaph” by Dennis Scott. I hadn’t heard of Dennis Scott before – much to my shame. I found “Epitaph” being discussed on a few blog sites – the first three lines are
They hanged him on a clement morning, swung between the falling sunlight and the women’s breathing, like a black apostrophe to pain
It’s a stunning, painful and perfectly precise image to start a poem with. The rest of the poem tells the story of the hanging of an enslaved person. By the end of the poem, the speaker moves from the use of ‘They’ at the beginning of the poem to ‘we’. The poem asks
what can we recall of a dead slave or two except that when we punctuate our island tale they swing like sighs across the brutal sentences, and anger pauses till they pass away.
The use of ‘we’ asks complicated questions about the responsibility of those who tell the story of what happened, and holds up the brutality of language and its failure, as well as calling into being the idea of sentences as punishment – assuming the murderers and perpetrators are not sentenced, then the “brutal sentence” can only fall on the victim, on their family, their ancestors and those who continue to tell the story of a place and a people.
In Scott’s poem, the brutality and violence of someone being hung is juxtaposed against ordinary everyday life – he writes
All morning while the children hushed their hopscotch joy and the cane kept growing he hung there sweet and low
That idea of ordinary life continuing against great tragedy called into mind W.H.Aud en’s Musée des Beaux Arts – another great poem that juxtaposes ordinary against extraordinary.
Kim Moore, Prompt-a-mania with Malika Booker
Our grief and fury could wash away creation.
Rachel Barenblat, Eikhah for Israel and Gaza
Will anyone survive, clinging to this battered ark?
Is there an olive tree left anywhere?
Even with her daughter dead
Carey Taylor, Arrivals and Departures
the cottonwoods in the ravine
left a downy shroud on the windows
while we sat in chairs
and fingered fabrics
for families
yet unscathed.
This year, I feel like I’ve finally achieved what I envisaged when we first moved in. I have drifts of cosmos, godetia, cornflower, nigella, clumps of swaying marguerites, tangles of perennial geranium all tumbling over Japanese stepping stones bordered by Irish moss. There are roses round the door and in the borders, each one bought in memory of a loved one. At the back I’ve made space to grow tomatoes and lettuce as well as courgettes and about five broad bean plants. I’ve grown some lovely cherries for the local magpie population, and I believe the blackbirds very much enjoyed my apples. I feel delighted, glad that this slow to emerge garden has finally come to be the space I imagined it could be.
And so it is with poetry. I realise I learn as I go along, which means I make many mistakes and often end up having to double back and relearn, or simply take a little more time. I sometimes become absorbed in a poem to the point where I can no longer be objective and think it’s a great deal more amazing than it is. I’ve learned that what I need to do is be patient with myself, let the words take hold, let the idea emerge, let the poem sit and become itself without my incessant fiddling and faffing. My poetry files and notebooks are as disordered as my garden, crammed with ideas and new projects and there are times when fragile seedlings risk being strangled by enthusiasm. I am slowly going through and sorting the weeds to give the seedlings space to bloom. I realise I ricochet between being chaotic and measured and it is in the measured times that the best work emerges. My desire to achieve, to prove, to become the best I can be, fulfil that terrible portentous thing, my potential, means I don’t allow myself the time to grow and bloom. Perhaps that is my focus for the rest this year, to learn to enjoy each stage of a poem’s growth, from seed of an idea to its first leaves, nurturing and finally seeing it bloom – before setting the seed for another crop of words and ideas that need nothing but nurture and patience to burst into glorious possibility.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, On being a slow poet
I need to find new ways to work, to write, to play. To find those juxtapositions that bring delight.
I know I just seem to come to this same brilliant conclusion over and over, but also, that’s the way life is. We have to fight for our optimism, fight for our enthusiasm, again and again and probably F-ing again. No one can hand it over to you, though it helps to be in proximity, to let others’ enthusiasms infect us. (Good contagion FTW).
Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – Do Not Lose Your Enthusiasm
These weren’t big-cry tears, but tears more like clouds that move over the sun on a breezy day. They passed by quickly, but they were almost always there, hanging in the sky. I came to expect and mostly accept them, in the way I have our heat waves we would once have described as “unseasonable.” I don’t like them, but I can’t fight them and I know they won’t last forever.
I also found myself unable to write about any of it, or to engage in some of the kinds of creative work that being housebound with limited physical capacity might lend itself to. My mind needed something different, something to take me away from the things I’m not yet ready to get too close to, but also something that could absorb my attention. I dove deep into writing the essay I shared here last week.
And that—even though it was about an uncomfortable subject—was such a balm. […]
I was reminded, again, of the freedom that comes with making choices to live small. I mean, some part of me would love to eat-pray-love my way around the world right now, or go buy a villa under the Tuscan sun, or do something else romantic, adventurous, and completely life-changing. I’m glad there are people in the world who do those things and write interesting books about them, but I’m not one of those people. I’m a homebody.
Rita Ott Ramstad, The luxuries of living small
Storm Pegs follows the poet’s life in Shetland as she tries to discover ‘where am I?’ As to be imagined, it’s full of poetic wonderings at the Shetland landscape and sea, travels to different corners and islands, learning about the language, the culture and people. It’s lush with details and unravellings.
Jen Hadfield fights against the idea that Shetland is isolated or remote and draws beautiful connections between the community, her neighbours and the creative scene in Shetland. But there is a sense that she’s quite comfortable in being hunkered down in her caravan, strapped down against the elements and prefers that edge-of-the-world feeling, that the sparse spaces and distance are something she craves.
She doesn’t try to show us how we should live, where to take your next holiday or how to find the poetic in your daily lives. This is the smallest glimpse of what her Shetland life is, make your own conclusions.
Jen is an amazing poet, with an eye for the small awkward details of the world, so I knew the writing would be exquisite. From her poetry, I knew she would draw me into the Shetland culture and wade through its language, scooping up glimmering fragments as she does glowing algae. I wasn’t disappointed.
She also gives us a hint of the day-to-day, making a life where she has no history, where she can write her own story as Poet as a neighbour calls her. It’s not always simple, of course, but she finds patterns of beauty in even cutting open worms when she needs a non-poetic job to pay the bills.
Gerry Stewart, Writing A Life
7. The collected poems of Audre Lorde from W. W. Norton Publishing, includes more than 300 poems, representing the complete works of Lorde who famously described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” For a reader with only a limited understanding of the times she lived in, the poems, in their punctuation-less flowing style, her voice getting progressively stronger even as she bears witness to the civil rights movement and her own challenges with childhood, identity, health and love, provide passionate and persuasive insight into her life and struggles and her unmistakable talent.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Reading list update -30
8. She writes of racial struggle (Speak proudly to your children / where ever you may find them / tell them / you are the offspring of slaves / and your mother was / a princess / in darkness – For each of you), the socio-economic conditions (A Black girl / going / into the woman / her mother desired / and prayed for / walks alone / and afraid / of both their angers. – Generation II), invoking African divinity and myth, friends and heroes, drawing from everyday incidents (For instance / Even though all astronauts are white / Perhaps Black People can develop / Some of those human attributes / Requiring / Dried dog food frozen coffee instant oatmeal / Depilatories deodorants detergents / And other assorted plastic – The American Cancer Society) and global history. “I am Black because i come from the earth’s inside / now take my word for jewel in the open light” – Coal
9. She writes openly of love in an honest, searing way, perhaps challenging the mores of the time:
– with love: How the dying of autumn was too easy / To solve our loving. – Spring III,
– with passion: the tips of my fingers are stinging / from the rich earth / but more so from the lack of your body – Sowing,
– with longing: I would wake / Trapped between a new day’s smell / And the artful manner of you / Smoothing your skirt, or sneezing. – Nightstone,
– one world revolving around the other: I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars / watching / you move slowly out of my bed / saying we cannot waste time / only ourselves – Movement Song
Eleven days down on the Sealey Challenge, twenty days to go. My brain is bursting, and though I’m making notes for future blogposts, there’s a tendency for everything to begin blurring together. Then (honestly, almost every day), something stands out.
In Molly Tenenbaum’s The Arborists, for me, it’s sound. As she is also, besides a poet, a gifted musician, a teacher of the art of banjo, of course it is. Not always euphony, often cacophony, baskets of sizzling s’s, explosions of repetition—in “Banjo, Banjo on the Wall,” this stanza:
I have seen a cat’s ass banjo, Pleiades banjo,
banjo overgrown with vines.
Never no more lighthouse banjo, never
no more poppy, paintbrush,
coastal wildflower banjo.You could study this book for how to make your poems jangle and twang (and sing). I’m pretty sure that Tenenbaum is one of those people who, when she walks into a room, you never know what will happen. And when she picks up a banjo? Well!
Bethany Reid, Michele Bombardier, WHAT WE DO
To dog your steps is to follow. It follows that “to cat your steps” is to trip.
Forget stone. The mosquito keeps trying to get blood out of a phone.
Minute 1: omg, I have so many books, where can i even put— Minute 2: omg, Dan has a book out *throws money*
In short 6 books or chapbooks are coming my way.
Pearl Pirie, Tidbit quicks
I’ve gone too far from the world of the spirit in the past months. I looked under mum’s hut yesterday at the great badger sett which gets bigger and bigger. I saw the young vixen come down the path, the same one who sleeps on mum’s rug sometimes in the sun, and who’s probably sharing the sett.
I linger at the doors of the spirit world from time to time – the lime leaves on the border of the allotment, the apple tree bowing under the weight of its fruit, plunging into the sea to cool off. On my shelves, so many poems too.
Jackie Wills, God of the Forest and books talking
“Keep All the Parts” contains poems that are a reflection of the landscapes, plants and animals Roy Young has observed in his area of Nottingham. He regards the scale of our impact on the environment is becoming significant but that there is still (just) to adapt and recover since human survival depends on humanity restoring damaged ecosystems. Self-interest is a powerful motivator. The title comes from the opening which sets out Young’s philosopy, “Intelligent Tinkering”, in four couplets, the last two of which are,
“if you take pieces to something
keep the parts all you need toif you take something to pieces
you need to keep all the parts”The earlier couplets are also muddled in word order, it takes some tinkering to reverse engineer the parts into a whole. But if any of the parts are lost, the parts won’t cohere into a whole.
Emma Lee, “Keep All the Parts” Roy Young (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
How versatile, pliable, handy the word “home.”
Jill Pearlman, Shifting Homes
Slippery as soap, foamy and comforting in a body way.
It was someone else’s room yesterday, but today, it has winked,
it has taken our toothbrushes into its interior. Its name
rolls off our tongues after a day of being on the outside:
“let’s go home.” The way of its shutters, the doors,
the morning jasmine, corners where the sun enters
and where it doesn’t, the ways of home.
“Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor” began just as the title discloses: as a text to my next-door neighbor. (Look, I really hated to send that text, because no one wants to be that guy, but I’m an insomniac as it is, and wind chimes right under my bedroom window made sleep impossible. My neighbor was incredibly gracious. No more wind chimes!)
The first two sentences of the poem are the text nearly verbatim. The assonance and internal rhyme—night/mind/chimes/right outside, and windy/bring in/wind—happened naturally without much massaging, and the wording is just smoothed out a little to make it more concise and rhythmically appealing. Then the poem continues to unspool the ideas by using repetition and variation. […]
I think of the repetitions in the poem as distorted echoes: the original phrase is called out early, but the echo—the call back—has been twisted, changed, made strange.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor”
Rescue Lines (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024) explores controlling behaviour, grief and recovery. To give you some context, I watched my mother and sister struggle in toxic relationships, and as a young woman, I was also subject to coercive control. I understand how it feels.
In this poem, I wanted to express the helplessness of the onlooker. The aim is to witness the damage that is done to women (often women, but not always) who endure this suffocating control, and to voice the secondary hurt of anyone who loves them.
I wrote the poem on my phone, at 4am after a poor night’s sleep. I usually make endless revisions to poems and their forms, but not in this case. The form of each stanza, shrinking in line-length down the page, was symbolic of the diminution of the self as it is worn away by bullying.
Drop-in by Lesley Curwen (Nigel Kent)
August is the month of the Sealey Challenge, which basically urges those who like/love poetry to read a book of poetry each day of the month. I haven’t given myself the challenge this year, but I am posting individual poetry books on my Instagram account daily–books from my personal library, mostly–and that means that I read a few of the poems, too. Sometimes I get carried away and re-read the entire book. [@aemichaelpoet]
This is not a bad thing.
Meanwhile, August this year behaves as it usually does, weather-wise: blisteringly hot and wiltingly humid. […]
August, as most of us learned back in grade school, is named after the emperor Augustus, whose name means “venerable, noble, majestic.” [Source: my favorite, Etymology Online]. The online source notes that “In England, the name replaced native Weodmonað ‘weed month’.” Weed month is a perfect name for August, and I think I will adopt it from now on. It certainly fits the current state of my vegetable patch as the dog days keep the outdoors too miserable for heavy labor in the dirt.
Ann E. Michael, August
I woke up thinking about those poems that seem to always be making the internet rounds to the delight or irritation of readers. I imagine the latter group is comprised of those same individuals who cringe at the opening notes of “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey.
I suspect there’s an implicit belief that the circulation of one poem comes at the expense of another. But I’m not sure it works that way. I would like for all poems to find their audience, but I do mean their audience, their particular readers. And this won’t look the same for every poem. A poem’s visibility doesn’t guarantee engagement or enjoyment. And writing with the express hope or purpose of engagement is almost guaranteed to fail. That’s manufacturing without the lifeblood of inspiration, insight, or whatever we want to call what drives us to the page.
Taking care to withhold cynicism, we might ask ourselves instead what makes these poems resonate with audiences. And I’d argue that instead of dismissing those traits, we celebrate them and cheer on the poets who have reached poets and non-poets widely. Perhaps we even stop using “accessible” as a pejorative—a poem can be both understood upon first or second read and be finely crafted, just as a poem can be bedeviling on first read and yield its treasures on each subsequent one. (Conversely, a poem can also be clear and dull, or difficult and flat.)
Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend
People admit to me, sometimes sheepishly, sometimes with a shrug, that they don’t “get” poetry. I get it. There’s a lot of poetry I don’t “get.” Poems that seem like a bunch of random stuff together. I believe the idea is that by putting stuff next to each other some interaction takes place such that connections are found amid and among the random stuff. I don’t know. These kinds of poems often leave me cold. They offend my sense-making sensibility. I’m forced to accept the possibility I’m being a dolt when I can’t find links that weave the images. When I can’t find a way into and through the poem. The poem I’m talking about this week is one of those poems that I don’t quite “get.” I’m interested in it, though, because I seem to be interested in it. It created an atmosphere for me. It made me think of things from my own life. It made me go write something. So I basically don’t really “get” the poem, but somehow it “got” me.
Marilyn McCabe, stayed the dark. I walked inside all
I was struck the other day by a well-read poet and critic who asked on Twitter whether Yeats was the last major writer of epigrams. He felt that he very rarely read contemporary epigrams, whereas I feel that I read poems best described as epigrams — in both English and French — quite frequently. As well as the handful of examples I quote at the end of this piece, I think also of Gillian Allnutt, in my view probably the best living British poet, whose poetry I’ve discussed in relation to that of the French poet Pierre Chappuis here and as an example of a kind of surrealism here. In the last few weeks I’ve also been reading the French poet Gérard Bocholier, many of whose poems also seem to me best described as epigrams. Do epigrams seem more “alive” to me as a poetic form because I am defining them differently (more broadly, perhaps, or in a way more influenced by early modern practice), or am I just reading different things? What do you think — can you think of many contemporary poets who can turn a good epigram?
Victoria Moul, Herbert’s worst poem (plus several good ones)
I believe there’s such a thing as a collection poem […] rather than a magazine poem. A collection poem might be slight if offered up on its own, but it complements the bigger poems around it when placed in the context of an ms, establishing dialogues and connections that run through a book and provide the whole with greater depth.
Matthew Stewart, The Spotifying of poetry
In fact, I have to admit that I’m starting to wince when I see poets and readers stating on social media that a poem is a banger. Banger after banger can get extremely tedious and mind-numbing after a while. As can hit after hit on Spotify…
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I found poetry in third grade. My teacher Pat is still a dear friend and mentor. I loved the way a poem could hold so much in so few words. All my intensity as a young kid had somewhere to go, somewhere playful and loving. I’m sometimes creatively impatient and I like to toggle in between projects. I love fiction but I find it harder to dip in and out of. I like to think each genre has its season in my life, and I’m definitely in a poetry season. […]
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I just completed a degree called Master of Religion in Public Life at divinity school, so I am very interested in the public aspect of readings. There’s something so beautifully nourishing and grounding about them— the simple act of showing up and saying here, I made this. On this first tour, I love that I got to drive to every city where I’ve lived and hug the people I love most. In that way, for those of us who have patched together our livings from fellowships and programs, the book tour really knit my life together. I learn so much from those who read Glass Jaw— and I also am aware that part of the process of being in a public space is embodying an archetype or image for others that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Raisa Tolchinsky (rob mclennan)
Every pantry should have a five-pound sack of flour. Flour is either the first, second or third ingredient in most of the recipes in the “Cakes, Cookies and Desserts” section of most cookbooks (notice I started with dessert first) but it’s also a necessary, if not the most necessary ingredient in bread, muffins, and other baked goods. What’s the poetry equivalent of flour?
I would say a good old-fashioned dictionary, not a digital lookup function but one you keep on the desk in front of you. I’ve referred many times to my 1965 Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (well, it was new in 1965!) which used to belong to one Doug Ruddell, whose name appears on the book’s flyleaf. I’ve used this book countless times, but one of its best features is that within its crumbling pages, I will often stumble upon a word I didn’t know. For example, I just looked down the page and found “despiteous,” an archaic word meaning “malicious.” (You might also want to get a copy of Webster’s Rhyming Dictionary, which lists over 71,000 rhyming words. Maybe rhyming in English isn’t as difficult as everyone thinks?)
If a dictionary is your poetry pantry’s sack of flour, then a thesaurus is a pound of butter. Butter (or margarine, olive oil, or other type of fat) sticks things together, gives foods flavor and richness, and provides moisture. Like a dictionary, every writer needs a thesaurus.
Erica Goss, Poetry Staples
Today, I made blueberry cake and coffee and worked a little on some carnival pieces before diving into the very last of the delayed dgp layouts from last season. A rare day where I do not have to be writing other things and am not pressing up against a deadline. I also turned my attention to a a new set of generated images based on a conversation J and I had as we drifted off to sleep high on edibles and groggy about creepy Chthulian-inspired houses rising out of the sea (and which I’ll be sharing soon.)
I’ve been reconsidering the Patreon question again as I ponder projects I’d really love to do, but that may require a little more money in the coffers that could be gained by having a few subscribers (even on the smaller tiers.) Maybe a few bucks monthly for exclusive web content like videos and poems, a few more for a paper bundle of postcards, stickers, prints, or zines. Then a larger amount for some special editions–hardcovers, tarot cards, luxe book box projects, etc (ie, the things I need extra funding for but would love to do if I had it.).
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2024
The first sunflowers have popped up at our local gardens, and with them the notion that fall is around the corner. I have been ill for so much of the summer that I barely noticed it passing so fast. I have been beating myself up for not getting much done the last two months, not much writing or submitting of poetry. I haven’t even been well enough to go get blood work done that I need to have done (they won’t let me get it while I’m sick.) I don’t always have control of my physical self, and that can be frustrating for a type-A control freak like myself.
But I did finally accomplish some of my Sealey Challenge (where you’re supposed to read a book of poetry a day in August.) Here are three: an anthology of mermaid poetry published a few years ago called Till the Tide, and brand new books Horns by Tiffany Midge (funny, biting wit!) and Autobiography of Rain by Lana Ayers (solemn, subtle, always worth reading.) I also pulled out Matthea Harvey’s If the Tabloids are True What Are You and Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes for inspiration.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Sealey Challenge, the First Sunflowers, and Fall is Coming Up!
On this day, 75 years ago, the first nuclear bomb was used in war. The effects of that bomb obliterated much of Hiroshima–and vaporized some of it. There were reports of people fused into pavement and glass–or just vanished, with a trace remaining at the pavement. The reports of the survivors who walked miles in search of help or water are grim. And many of those survivors would die of the effects of radiation in the coming years.
In a strange twist, today is also the Feast Day of the Transfiguration in Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches, the day when Jesus went up the mountain with several disciples and becomes transfigured into a radiant being. Those of you who worship in Protestant churches may have celebrated this event just before Lent began, so you may not think of it as a summer kind of celebration. Pre-Reformation traditions often celebrated this day in conjunction with blessing the first harvest. […]
We cling to the Ancient Lie
of the violence that can redeem
us. We purge and plunge whole
landscapes into the land of ash and smoke.
The sun rises over a steamy swamp
of decimated land and decapitated dreams.Like Peter, we long to harness Holiness,
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Transfiguring Atoms
to build booths, to charge admission.
Christ turned into Carnival.
No need to do the hard, Christian work:
repairing community, loving the unlovable.
No, we seek redemption in the flame.
sometimes we are just
Robin Gow, nail gun crucifixion
reenactors trying to find a seam.
i want to know if there is a divine
in there somewhere. if i took a sledge hammer
to the walls of my childhood home,
how many versions of my father
i would find there.
The days fill and empty, empty and fill. Doors close and open.
Luisa A. Igloria, Fairy Tale, with Dreamscapes and Moonlight
Should we always be asking Am I happy? Are you happy? Are we?
Yet I wish we lived under the same roof, forgiving, forgiven.
That kind of success, that kind of propitious ending—